The Pricker Boy Page 8

  “Sometimes you talk like a mental patient,” Vivek says.

  “I suppose so,” she responds.

  “Okay,” Robin says. “But I need to … visit the bushes.”

  “Let me go with you,” Emily says. They strike off toward a weak break in the brush. The three of us guys stand together awkwardly for a few minutes. Ronnie opens his mouth to say something to Vivek but then decides against it. I don’t think he wants to look at me. He stares at the path that Emily and Robin have just gone down.

  “Are you trying to look at the girls while they go wee-wee?” Vivek asks him.

  Ronnie’s face goes red. “Nuh-no!” he stammers. “I wouldn’t … of course not!”

  “You little perv!”

  “Stop it!” he shouts, his voice wavering. “Don’t you start picking on me too!”

  Vivek chuckles. “I’m just trying to make you laugh, bud. You look a little tense.”

  Ronnie smiles as if the joke has suddenly dawned on him. A moment later we hear Robin screaming.

  Without hesitating, all three of us lunge into the brush. I can hear Robin calling out to us. I can’t hear her well, but she sounds desperate, as if she and Emily are in danger.

  We’re all stomping through the brush toward them, and I feel a bit of a thrill. I guess that the other guys feel the thrill too. We’re guys. It may seem old-fashioned, and my mother would kill me if I ever admitted it to her, but every guy gets a little rush of adrenaline when he has the opportunity to run to the aid of a damsel in distress.

  “You guys gotta see this!” Robin yells. Suddenly she and Emily don’t sound like they’re in trouble at all. In fact, if my cousin thinks it’s cool, it’s probably not something that you need to rush to see.

  Then I see the first one, just off to my left. A boulder as big as a tractor trailer. Then another, even larger one just beyond it, and still another on the right. It’s almost as if we’re running through a shallow valley made of stone.

  We find the girls. Robin can’t stand still. She hops up to us. “Can you believe it?”

  “Look!” Vivek shouts. “A glacial erratic! I mean, a big rock!”

  Emily is staring straight up the side of a thirty-foot-tall rock face. She calmly reaches forward with her finger and pokes it as if she’s testing to see if it’s real. Satisfied that it’s solid, she starts to eat her pistachios again.

  “See?” I shout. “I told you! I told you it was real!” I punch Ronnie lightly on the shoulder. He winces and rubs the punch away.

  The rock’s at least twenty-five feet long, and it seems top-heavy. Looking up at it makes me dizzy, makes me feel like the whole thing is about to fall over on top of us. This place is like a dream. Giant stone monuments form walls all around us. We’re under tall, slender pine trees, so there’s not much brush. The trunks look like thin supports holding up a solid ceiling of intertwined pine branches.

  And the strangest thing of all … it feels peaceful. My first thought is that I’d love to camp right here under the protective pine roof, right up next to this wall of stone. I’d love to wake to the sun speckling the orange pine needles on the ground. I can’t explain it. Here I am deep into the Pricker Boy’s territory, and I’ve found a place so calm and quiet that I’d rather sleep here than in any other place in the world, even my own bed in my own home.

  I’m not tired, but still I could curl up right now at the base of one of these trees. If I did, I can almost believe, really believe, that the pine needles would give way slightly, as if they were covering not the hard ground but layers of soft blankets.

  I shake my head clear of thoughts of peace and sleep.

  Off to the left side, a wide path hooks around between this stone and another, smaller one. Ronnie walks over toward the path. “That almost looks like … it’s wide enough to be a road between the boulders.” He runs up to see what’s behind the stone. “Oh no.” He stumbles backward. I catch him before he falls on the rocks, then walk up to see what he’s discovered. I feel the others come up behind me.

  My father has been telling us for years about an abandoned house that he and my Uncle Bill had once found way out in the woods. He said that the place had been empty for ages. The walls were covered with black mold both inside and out. Inside, you had to watch the floorboards because if you stepped onto the wrong ones, you’d fall right through into the basement. It was full of rickety furniture and shattered glass and decaying mattresses and plates and pots and pans. They used to spend hours out there poking around. He found a broken pocket watch one time, and Uncle Bill found three silver-dollar coins.

  One day, they found some papers in a desk with the name “Hora” on it. From then on, they called it the Hora House. When Dad told us about it, we didn’t hear him correctly, so we called it the Horror House. He corrected us, but we called it the Horror House anyway.

  One summer day when I was about eight, my father disappeared into the woods. He was gone for three or four hours. When he came back, he told us that he had gone off in search of the Hora House. He had wanted to take us back there and show it to us. He thought we’d think it was cool. And it would have been. I’d have gone back into the woods with my dad. Sure, it was heading into Pricker Boy domain, but I was littler and I figured it’d be okay if I was with my dad. I mean … he’s Dad. When you’re a little kid, what more do you need to chase the monsters away than your dad?

  But he couldn’t find it. He said he searched for hours but came up with nothing. I remember him being really down about it. Like there was a piece of his childhood that he wanted to share with us, but it had evaporated over the years. Like it never really existed at all.

  But it does exist, and I know because I’m staring down at it right now. The Hora House is right in front of me.

  Or what’s left of it, which is not much. Most of the wood rotted away long ago. The only things still standing are a tall stone chimney on the right side and a small portion of the far wall. In front of us is a hole cut sharply into the ground. It looks like a giant knife blade reached down and sliced out the earth. The basement walls are built of flat stones laid without any mortar. Laid well, I guess, considering they’re still holding up long after the wood above them has rotted away. A single white birch tree grows straight up from the bottom of the cellar.

  My heart pounds, but I don’t think it’s from fear. This is a discovery, our first real discovery, considering we already knew about the Hawthorn Trees and the offering stone. I jump down a slight, stony incline until I’m level with the house.

  “Ronnie?” I ask. “I seem to remember you mentioning this in the story a few years back. You haven’t brought it up in a while. Why don’t you tell us again?”

  “I can’t,” he says. “Not right now.” He wipes his hand across his brow, and I can see his fingers shaking. He’s had this place woven into the story for years. Sometimes he includes it, and sometimes he doesn’t. But I’m not sure he ever really believed in it. Now he’s face to face with it, and he can’t deny it.

  “I think now is the perfect time,” I insist.

  He keeps to the edges of the boulders and doesn’t walk up to the foundation. I don’t think he can. “Okay,” he mumbles. “This is the Horror House. I mean, uh, it’s really called the Hora House. I heard about it from Stucks, who heard about it from his dad. I went to the town hall and the library and looked up a little about it. I found out that … uh, Stucks? Can’t I tell it at the next fire?”

  “Come on, Ronnie,” I laugh. I want him to say it, if for no other reason than to try to freak out my cousin, who has probably heard about the place from her own dad.

  “Well, the Hora House was built in the 1940s by Daniel Hora, who was a guy from New York who’d made it big in the … in the …”

  “Hat business,” I say. I don’t know if it was hats, but I don’t want Ronnie to get stuck.

  “Yeah, hat business,” Ronnie continues. “He wanted a cottage way off in the country, so he had one built deep in the woods.
That’s where this path comes from. It’s what’s left of the road he had cut through the woods to reach the house.… It’s just the way I’d always imagined it to be.”

  Emily keeps circling around the foundation, peering down into the bottom.

  “He had a wife, and one weekend they wanted to get away. But he got held up at the … uh …”

  “Hat shop,” I say.

  “Yeah, so he sent his wife on ahead to meet a car at the train station. He showed up later that night, long after dark. As he approached the house, he heard laughter from inside.”

  Robin goes pale. This was worth it all, all the bugs and the sweat and the blood, worth it all just to see that look on her face.

  “Turns out that in the few hours she was left alone, the wife had gone completely insane. Completely. Spent the rest of her life in an institution, babbling about a monster that appeared out of the mist. Claimed that hollow-eyed little children danced in circles around the cottage while she went crazy inside. Daniel Hora never came back to the cottage. And when people asked him, he told them that the earth in these woods was cursed and that no one should ever walk there again.” Ronnie turns away, unable to look at the house anymore.

  “And now,” I add, “the foundation of the Hora House forms a stone pit.”

  “Like the Pricker Boy’s stone pit?” Vivek asks. “Uh, um, but you’ve got a bit of a time-line problem there.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, the Pricker Boy was ‘born’ around when? A hundred years ago, so Ronnie says. But then hat man built his cottage in the 1940s, right?”

  “So?” I ask him.

  “So you’re making it fit because you want it to. The Pricker Boy couldn’t have lived in a stone pit that wouldn’t be dug for another fifty years or so.”

  “Maybe the pit was here, and Hora dug his foundation around the pit.”

  “Or maybe Ronnie can create magical places with his mind! This is crazy. You hear a little of this and that and Ronnie writes his story around it, and then we find this place and you both try to make it all fit together. Just to scare us.” He stares at Ronnie and me. Emily passes by on her third trip around the foundation and smiles at Vivek.

  “Okay, maybe Emily isn’t scared, but she’s as bonkers as a drunken bedbug. Look at me—I’m scared enough to puke. Look at Robin, bud. She’s your blood. Doesn’t that mean something to you? You just found a piece of your father’s and her father’s history, a second-generation discovery, and you’re using it to scare her silly. This could be really cool … but it isn’t.”

  Robin folds her arms in front of her chest, gripping her elbows tightly. Despite the heat, she appears terribly cold. I’ll admit it, I’m enjoying her fright until, out of the corner of my eye, I see Emily leap down inside the foundation.

  And immediately, without reason, I am as terrified as both Ronnie and Robin.

  Her feet hit the half-rotted leaves in the basement of the Hora House, and things that have been sleeping down there for years and years now wake up and begin to spin around her ankles. Emily can’t see them, but I can.

  She starts poking around the walls of the foundation. She trips over an old bottle and picks it up, holding it up to the sunlight. One of the things comes up with her wrist and wraps around her forearm before dripping back toward the ground. She pokes at a few old bedsprings. All the while, those things are waking up and swirling, rising around her, flapping like mad birds. They are angry things, tiny things, young things that have been asleep for so very long and don’t like being woken from their nap.

  “Get out,” I say.

  Emily looks up at me. “Excuse me?”

  “Get out. Now.”

  “But this is interesting,” Emily says, completely unaware of what is twirling around her torso.

  “You have to … you have to get out. Climb, now! It isn’t safe!”

  “We should go,” Robin says. “Please! This doesn’t feel right!” I’m amazed that we’re actually agreeing about something, and I wonder for an instant if she can see what I see.

  “But how often do you get the chance to—” Emily protests.

  “Get out now!” I scream, and Emily climbs out of the cellar.

  She looks me up and down as if I’m some kind of specimen wiggling in a dish. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I look down into the cellar. Whatever lives down there begins to settle in again.

  “We should get on with this,” I tell them, and I begin to head back. I don’t look over my shoulder. As soon as I feel the Hora House disappearing into the trees behind me, as soon as that nest of boulders is no longer visible, I feel better, like I’ve once again woken up from a terrible night vision.

  My heart calms down. My head is clear. I’ve learned enough for today. I’m ready to go home.

  As soon as the weather was warm enough for us to sit in a boat without freezing our asses off, Pete and I would get up early and gather our gear and sneak through the woods to Ed Giles’s cottage. Ed Giles is a loudmouthed retiree who winters down in the Florida Keys. He spends the whole summer asking us year-rounders how the winter was, just so he can tell us how warm the water is in the Keys at Christmastime. Overall, he isn’t a bad guy, though.

  We’d grab the hull of Ed’s Sunfish and take it down to the pond. Ed wouldn’t be up to his place for a few months yet, and we figured that he wouldn’t mind if we borrowed his sailboat for a few hours. Actually, we didn’t care whether he minded or not. What was important was that he wouldn’t know.

  We couldn’t get at the sail or the rudder, so we always nabbed two canoe paddles from under his cottage. We’d slip into the water and paddle quietly down past our houses and into the cove, where our parents couldn’t spot us. Once in the cove, we’d let the Sunfish drift, guiding it with only the lightest paddle strokes, moving so slowly that we would barely ripple the smooth water.

  Pete usually chose our fishing spot. I still don’t know what led him to pick one place over another, but whatever spot he chose for us to cast into was sure to bring fish. The ones he reeled in were always bigger than mine, and to this day I don’t know why he was a better fisherman than I was. He’d even let me use his rod, reel, and bait, and he’d use mine. He still got bigger fish. Bass for him, crappie for me.

  One April morning a couple years ago, we were out on the water just after dawn. Pete brought a couple hot dogs, and I grabbed some worms from Nana’s compost pile. We coasted into the cove, baited our hooks, and cast out into the pond. The early morning sunlight made the bugs flying over the water light up golden. Sunset is nice on Tanner Pond, but there’s nothing like sunrise. The water at sunset isn’t usually calm, and even if it is, you can sense people up and moving around and talking, even if they don’t come out of their cottages. In the early morning, though, most everyone is still asleep, and the water and the light and the fish are only there for the privileged few. Those fishing and those reading, and not many others.

  Except Hank Paulding. On that particular day, Hank was up too. He’s a year-rounder, like us, a harmless guy who hasn’t quite reached middle age, but he’s missed his window of opportunity for getting married, and he behaves accordingly. Pete and I once left ten bars of soap on his doorstep as a joke. I guess it was a little mean. But it was funny too.

  Hank came down to the pond, stepped out onto his wobbly rock pile, and called out to us across the water. Pete held up his finger. “Quiet, Hank,” Pete called back, keeping his voice as low as possible.

  “Oh yeah, fish,” Hank replied, still too loud. For some reason Hank has never learned that sound carries over water. On a morning like that one we would have been able to hear two people having a normal conversation from clear across the cove. Secrets don’t stay secrets if you let them get too close to the water.

  “What you boys fishin’ for?” Hank asked us.

  “Fish,” Pete said.

  “Pike?” Hank asked. “Bass? Bream?”

  “Fish!” Pete said.

&nb
sp; Hank looked at the water as if he were trying to spot fish and shoo them over our way.

  “I’ll tell you how to catch trouts!” Hank said.

  Pete nodded. “Okay, later.” He tried to wave Hank off, but it worked about as well as it usually worked with Hank.

  “You use corn!” Hank said.

  Pete looked at me as if Hank was crazy. Hank was crazy, so I don’t know why Pete looked so surprised.

  “See, all these trouts is stocked. They stock them around Saint Patrick’s Day. And you know what they feed those trouts in their trout farms? Pellets! Pellets that look just like corn.” Hank looked at us as if he’d just shared secret military launch codes. “Those fish think corn is what they’ve been eating all along! You fish with corn, and you’ll catch tons of trouts, believe me!”

  Pete picked up his oar and started pulling at the soft water. We glided away from Hank. I turned around and waved to him as we left. Hank was a nut, but he wasn’t a bad nut, and I didn’t want him to think we were just trying to get away from him, even though we were.

  “Might as well drop dynamite down on them,” Pete said once we found a new fishing spot. “It’s not fair to the fish. It’s wrong.”

  My line wiggled. I reeled in. I pulled in a little one about six or seven inches long, which was about usual for me. “Pumpkinseed,” I said.

  “Bluegill,” Pete said. “See that blue spot just behind the gill? That’s how you know it’s a—say it with me—”

  “A bluegill,” we said together.

  “Pumpkinseeds have orange on them. Orange, you know? Like a …”

  “A pumpkin,” I said. I could never tell them apart. I’d see a pumpkinseed with what looked like a blue spot on him and call him a bluegill. I’d see a bluegill with a slight flash of red on him and call him a pumpkinseed. They’re all crappie and I should’ve just called them that.

  I reached down to take it off the hook. “Easy,” Pete said.

  “I know,” I said. Actually, I didn’t care much about being gentle. I was going to grab that fish as tight as I could and hope that one of its dorsal spikes didn’t stab my palm.